The Longer Tail: Criticism of Content Abundance and Digital Culture

After reading all the secondary literature on this classic book on the economic changes brought by the Internet, finally got hold of it.

the long tail by chris anderson, book cover

Hits are no longer the economic force they once were. A large part of the demand has gone to countless niches. Today’s consumer picks hits just as easily as special non-professional content.

The past: broadcast model sends 1 show to many people. Today: the Internet makes many shows available to 1 person.

Scarcity based economics: requires hits. Only a few slots are available. Then they better be what most people will appreciate. But what is there are an infinite number of slots: The Long Tail.

Curse of the traditional retails business: the need to find local audiences. The market in the stores in only 1/3 of the total market. The biggest money is in the smallest sales.

From geographical separation consumers are now united by their interests.

Theme of the Long Tail:

  • There are more niche goods than hits
  • The cost of reaching niches has fallen dramatically – offering a huge variety of products is now possible
  • Filter now drives demand – filters are necessary for the exploring the Long Tail
  • The demand curve flattens where niches becomes accessible – hits are less frequent and less popular
  • The collective market for niches is huge and rivals the hits market

Trends: democratize production and democratize distribution.

Aggregators like Amazon, eBay, iTunes, Netflix democratize distribution. Production is democratize through availability of technology: video production, music editing, self publishing, printing, …

Aggregators make available a large variety of good, physical, digital, information, services, communities, user created content (this).

Long Tail demand requires a fan-base that is slowly build. Sudden hits become very rare. Hits can be virals.

Collective intelligence filters the content in The Long Tail: ratings, reviews, …

The Long Tail also manifests itself in culture: the Internet deminishes barriers for niche cultures to reach and find like-minded people. Geek Culture arises.

The secret of Long Tail business:

  • Make everything available
  • Help me find it
  • Marketing: focus on word of mouth: influencers, bloggers, A/B testing, gimmicks, stunts, sharing.

A classic.

Related reading: Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants.

Tom Peters – The Pursuit of WOW!

the pursuit of wow by tom peters - book cover

After reading 163 Little Big Things, one more fantastic book by Tom Peters, stuffed full of illustrated advice: The Pursuit of WOW! 

Style like a hammer. Straight forward, what I like in Peters as I do in writers like Nicholas Nassim Taleb and James Altucher. Like James Altucher, Tom Peters’ lists are lovely exhaustingly long.

The write up of the conversations in the book are not such a big attraction to me. I found them not very entertaining and I started skipping pages. (Reading mcust be fun, or I will start skipping pages or the entire book.)

Peters is very nicely unconventional. Hates pretence. Hates arrogance. Loves to talk to the people on the floor.

For a non-fiction writer he advertises fiction books wholeheartedly.

Fiction beats nonfiction. Avoid nonfiction! It’s too unrealistic. Lately I’ve reveled in Paul Bowles, Heinrich Böll, Julian Barnes, and Max Frisch, among others. Nothing conveys the richness of life in quite the same way as a great novel.

What is great Peters is not afraid to quote researchers (who) that have found the work of some organisational advisors, amongst which Peters and Waterman totally useless.

Fantastics Reading List. A freaking good book.

Do! Experimentation over analysis.

The first 99.9 percent of getting from here to there is the determination to do it and not to compromise, no matter what sort of roadblocks those around you (including peers) erect.”

What does all this add up to? It’s what I call the difference between doing something “for” the market, and being part “of” the market. “For” firms depend on data collection and manipulation, detached analysis, elaborate market plans, and planner-designer-marketers versed in the latest B-school techniques. “Of” firms seek out zany employees with out-of-the-ordinary views, nurture a spirit of adventure, cherish instinct and intuition, and dote on things that have never been tried before.

Love this one: pounding this all the time, and quoting Steve Jobs as well: “Customers do not know what they want.”
Tom Peters is a bit more elegant:

Competitive businesses must lead their customers. The prospective buyer can’t tell you what she likes until she has used it and lived with it.

Good Books.
Running a One-Person Business by Claude Whitmyer, Salli Rasberry, and Michael Phillips.

Solutions are to the point:

…understanding that the more apparently mundane-humdrum the product (or service), the better the chance that DESIGN MINDFULNESS can revolutionize it (BECAUSE MOST IDIOTS DONT GET IT)

Details matter.

“It’s the Loo, Dummy!”

Paying specialists more than managers.

“Did Moses have a secret Eleventh Commandment that said that bosses have to be paid more than the people that report to them?”

On corporate procrastination.

“A good deal of corporate planning … is like a ritual rain dance,” wrote Dartmouth’s Brian Quinn. “It has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does…. Moreover, much of the advice related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.”

…

“The object of business is not to be lean and mean, not to reorganize and then re-engineer. The object of business is to invent, to grow—and add to employment over time.”

On self-organisation.

“Changing a culture of dependence to a culture of self-organizing independence is hard work. But at least what I’m reporting here suggests that it doesn’t go against the human grain.”

Self organisation has largely failed because appropriate tools are not in place. It is often a short-sighted cost cutting operation where administrative roles have been moved to the daily work of staff. I remember all the (otherwise billable) hours I spent booking a business trip. Or doing my expenses and fight the expense reimbursement teams in the Philippines (outsourced of course, with strict rules and no authorization so make decisions) to get my money back. Tools should be in place before starting self organisation.

Corporatism. Seen it in real life.

“No, I don’t envy for a moment the laid-off, 52-year-old middle manager who’s spent his entire career in the womb called IBM. My life, my house-painter friend’s life, the life of any independent contractor looms as a frightening and unnerving prospect to him.”

…

“Getting good at any damn thing takes work; getting artful takes hard, continuous work. Bikes, skates, sailboats, gardening … and computers. So don’t wait for tomorrow, hoping that the arrival of the no-brainer computer will make you a facile member of the 21st-century technology club in the space of a few minutes.”

Books and more books… A massive library of Peters’ sources.

Jobs roles forget them. Engagement is key. Also or maybe especially for roles serving internal customers. Getting to know your (internal) customers is the most important thing.

“Eliminate all job descriptions. NOW. (Today.) Destroy all organizational charts. NOW. (Today.) Have all top corporate/divisional managers pledge two days per month to customer visits (puny, really), two days per month to supplier and distributor visits. Make sure that every person in the organization makes at least two customer visits a year.”

Be always ready to change. Change. Be curious. Crazy. Naive.

“If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.” L. Wittgenstein

Good To Great Big BIG Things

Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

I was astonished, reading Good To Great. It has so many findings about great companies, that are massively ignored.

Many business leaders have referred to this book as a guide in their leadership practice. While in their own organisations the findings they cast aside the findings in this book on a day by day basis.

Let’s go through a couple of these themes.

Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.

So no need to attract expensive business leaders from the outside. What we hear about their compensations schemes we sometimes find unethical and excessive.

We found no systematic pattern linking specific forms of executive compensation to the process of going from good to great.

Not only does the compensation not necessarily need to be very high. Moreover, the leaders of these companies stand out in humility. Leaders of great companies are to themselves, focused on the company, not themselves, have a big sense of humility and do not have big egos, are persistent calm and determined.

Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

As surprising, great companies are not great because they have such a fantastic strategy. Nor is it technology or acquisitions, a very promising industry or special program.

Discipline and perseverance are the most important traits of great companies.

Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

…

In confronting the brutal facts, the good-to-great companies left themselves stronger and more resilient, not weaker and more dispirited. There is a sense of exhilaration that comes in facing head-on the hard truths and saying, “We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail.

…

No, those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake.

It is doing the work, a feel for business, grit, a lack of arrogance, not taking anything for granted, that distinguishes the great companies
It is in such a sharp contrast with what you see in the large majority of the Fortune 500 companies, that I wonder how the leaders in these companies, and the big consulting companies advising these companies, and likely the investors in these companies can continue to ignore such fundamental findings.

When you put these two complementary forces together—a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship—you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.

Read on:

Tom Peters, for example The Little BIG THings.

Collins refers to Stockdale’s In Love and War, a book I would like to read next.

Little Insight from Insight Selling

I will (and believe can) summarise Insight Selling by Mike Schulz and John Doerr with a few quotes.51fhppsuv2l-_sx333_bo1204203200_

I managed to get halfway through the book. Concurring with Naval Ravikant who does not read business books as ‘they are very simple ideas wrapped up in a lot of pages’. I also agree to not read books that are not keeping your attention.